Power Corrupts: SYOC
by a daughter lost in hell
Summary: Submit your own character. Thirty years after the Avengers fell at the battle of New York, people with powers are an open secret. They are hunted. They are used. They are feared. So what happens when a girl with godlike powers disappears? They try to find her. SYOC! Still open, 16/2/16!
1. Foreword: Submission Form

_"The Battle of New York changed the world, scared the world. All of it - the magic, the mayhem, the monsters - it could no longer be ignored."_

* * *

 **Power corrupts.**

Thirty years after the world was invaded from above and the Avengers sacrificed their lives to save the universe, people with powers - strange, terrifying powers - are an open secret.

In Hong Kong, some criminals gangs use these gifted as enforcers and security, utilising their talents for their own unsavoury uses, while yet more eke out a living working for others.

In St Petersburg, these superpowered individuals are hunted down like animals, for fear of what they could unleash upon an unsuspecting world.

In Thimphu, a sanctuary is opened for those seeking a safe place to develop and train their abilities, far from persecution, whereas in Tbilisi, they are brought into SHIELD training programs in the hopes of crafting a new Avengers.

New York, Paris, Karachi, London, Johannesburg - in all of these places and more, people struggle to hide, to control, to master their abilities.

 **You know what they say about absolute power, don't you?**

It begins in Hong Kong. Whispers of a powerful girl - too powerful - a girl who could unmake and remake the entire world with a thought. Few know what she can do, only that her ability is devastating. And that makes her valuable.

The triads want to use her. The humans want her dead. The sanctuary wants to protect her. SHIELD wants to find her first.

Let the hunt begin.

* * *

RULES

1\. You may submit a maximum of two characters. They must be of different genders.

2\. All categories marked with a * are optional. The more detail you give me, the more likely they will be accepted!

3\. This story will mainly borrow from the Daredevil and Jessica Jones Netflix series in terms of themes and atmospheres. It still takes place in the Marvel universe, but on a "street" level. It also takes place in an AU, where the Avengers won the battle of New York, but died in the process. Thus, the events of TWS, TDW, and IM3 did not occur.

4\. Please keep your character's abilities to a sensible level! There is only one "story breaker" character present, so please give your characters drawbacks and weaknesses.

5\. Please, have fun! If you have read these rules, put your character's theme song and their surname in the subject line of your PM. Please do PM these submissions to me, or if you have any questions!

* * *

Name:

Nicknames or Aliases*:

Age:

Gender:

Personality:

Appearance:

Clothing*:

Face Claim*:

Occupation*:

History:

Power*:

Flaws:

Family and Relationships:

Alignment:

Why are they chasing the girl?:

Story ideas:


	2. Forty Three Rounds Per Minute

_First of all - to everyone who has submitted a character, I want to thank you, sincerely, from the bottom of my heart. You guys have created some fascinating, unique and likeable characters that I am really looking forward to writing. I can only hope I do a good job! If I haven't got back to you yet, I will soon. I aim to respond to all submissions, even those I cannot accept in a primary capacity. The characters introduced in this chapter are not the only main characters accepted this far, and some of you may notice hints to the others near the end._

 _Second \- this story is still _**OPEN FOR SUBMISSION** _for the foreseeable future, including for main character roles. The characters in this chapter merely comprise the first of many to be accepted, which I will introduce slowly so as not to drown you all with names and places. Keep in mind, and I hate to do this, but reviews, the longer and more critical the better, will cause me to view your submission more kindly. It reassures me that, not only will you read the story and remain invested, but that you will correct me if I go astray with your character or anyone else's. It's the only way that I will get better! What characters did you like best, which could you not stand? What do you think will happen next?_

 _Third \- I'm no video editor, so please consider this nothing more than an animated Pinterest board but you can find the first trailer for this story here! _

www. youtube watch?v =-77p7z VR4p8

 _I_ _t introduces this chapter's characters and the world of the story, and hopefully will be followed by more in later days. If you want to tell me what you think, or how to improve, you can do so as a comment, in your review, or in a PM. Can you identify all the characters? XD_

 _Now. With all that bureaucracy out of the way, I present the first chapter, starring_ Songs of Gaslight' _s_ _**Oksana** , _Sig _'s **Siyah** , _thedaffodilqueen _'s **Marsden** , and_ W.R _._ Winter _'s **Leonardo**. I hope you enjoy._

* * *

broken glass blood bone bullet casings bright bright bright

they shouldn't have chased her. she shouldn't have panicked. it shouldn't have happened.

shouldnt shouldnt shouldnt

she put her hands in her pocket and turned away while the fire blazed higher.

* * *

 _I'm bigger than my body,_

 _I'm colder than this home,_

 _I'm meaner than my demons,_

 _I'm bigger than these bones._

 _And all the kids cried out,_

 _"Please stop, you're scaring me."_

 _I can't help this awful energy -_

 _Goddamn right, you should be scared of me,_

 _Who is in control?_

* * *

She spat a tooth into the sink, and blood with it - blood on the edge of the mirror and around the crescent curve of her nails, clinging to the tips of her fingers and staining the sharp points of her teeth. Hers? No. She couldn't remember bleeding. Her veins didn't remember bleeding. Not recently.

Although she could remember a knife - sharp-edged and silver, like an old-fashioned straight razor. Not serrated.

She wiped impatiently at split, stinging, lips and ran dirty fingers roughly through tangled, inky hair, risking a dark glance up at the grimy silvered surface of the mirror so that she met her own gaze. It felt shaky - it looked strong. Dangerous. She was good at that by now. Her ragged fingernails had left red and white marks in her sard-brown skin, along the jagged edge of her cheekbones and her jaw where they protruded through the thin flesh, sharp as surgical scalpels. She looked hungry. She looked tired.

Siyah was only nineteen, but she always looked older.

Someone pounded at the door, three taps, quick, and she coughed more blood and spat.

" _Mgoi dang haa_ ," she said sharply, and heard the footsteps move away again, echoing, dimly.

She shook her hands as though to dislodge the pins and the needles that had taken up residence there. She inhaled. Exhaled. Tilted her head towards the light and admired the shiny new black bruise that was darkening like a stormy sky on her right temple, squeezing the corner of her eye into a scowl.

Beyond the door, she could hear... not quite screaming. But shrill. Masculine. A Guangxi accent - a southerner, then.

" _Néih daai ngóh heui bīn? Néih daai ngóh heui bīn_?"

She pushed her hair back with an impatience and violence that belied the cinders in her nerves, the thorns in her veins, and watched her eyes carefully in the mirror. She hadn't burst any blood vessels today. Not yet, at least. The day was still young, wasn't it?

Siyah put her jacket back on - a ragged hoody, with one cuff composed in the main of trailing threads, reaching beyond her fingertips. For a job like this, there was no point in trying to impress.

She picked up the tooth from the sink and put it in her pocket before she went back out.

The warehouse was cavernous, with an arched ceiling high enough to accommodate a small house if one was so inclined, and hard walls of concrete that reflected sound back onto itself until the air was filled with the reverberating echo of the same words, again and again and again.

He was saying, "please". They had put him in a chair, and his hands were bound behind his back, which faced her as she walked towards him. Old-fashioned. More than a little sadistic. She could see his fingers moving gently, like he was playing an invisible harmonica. He had a wedding ring, a burnished gold leaf band.

Siyah's sneakers made no sound on the floor, but one of the older Laus, Lau Yang, moved his head to watch her as she approached. The man in the chair didn't have to ask what Lau Yang was looking at. He knew. He had probably known the second they dragged him into this cold, dark warehouse, with blood on the floor.

"Please," he said again as Siyah walked around him and he saw her for the first time. She didn't say anything, just paused a few feet away from them, her hands by her side.

"You know who she is," said Lau Hei. His teeth and upper lip were tinged black at the edges from chewing tobacco. He had two piercings in his ear, thick steel bars that caught the light and glared. "Don't you?"

The man's eyebrow trembled. He couldn't find the words, Siyah thought - they were trapped somewhere behind his ribcage. He nodded.

"Who is she?" said Lau Yang, who still held the smoking end of a cigarette between his yellow nails. Taunting. "Do you know?"

The man was silent. His eyes shone beneath the glare of the flashlights held by Lam and Chen. His shoulders shook like his bones were rattling, trying to come out through his skin.

"Do you know?" Lau Yang repeated.

When he got no answer, he took a long draw on his cigarette until the end glowed crimson, and then he plucked it from his lips and drove the butt into the skin of his own forearm, just above the watch around his wrist, where the veins pulsed fastest. Lau Yang did not change his expression, but the man tied to the chair did - the arteries in his neck strained as he pushed against the ropes and yelled in agony, and Siyah caught the smell of burning flesh.

"Bonebreaker," he said. "She's the bonebreaker."

It didn't matter how often she heard that whispered behind her. She never got used to it.

"Correct," Lau Hei said, and Siyah took that as her cue to step forward. She did. Lau Yang lifted the cigarette. The man slumped back against the back of his chair and she turned her palm to face him. He blanched, the colour draining from a ruddy face. She thought he would plead again.

"I have nothing more to tell you," he said hoarsely. He wasn't lying. "I've told you everything. I've told you no lies. I have nothing left to give you."

Lau Hei nodded. Yang sucked on his cigarette. "We believe you," Hei said.

Siyah touched his arm.

* * *

Oksana had a poster in her room. She had pinned it to the back of her bedroom door, between an old photo of the dead mother and a sepia-toned concert picture of a man playing a guitar solo beneath **ДДТ** 's distinctive white logo.

It was a poster of herself, one of the nicer photos that had ever been taken of her - her eyes were big and dark and expressive, her mouth hinting at the ghostly traces of a smile - and beneath it, in block print and big black letters: **_УБИЙЦА_**.

 **MURDERER**.

A handgun lay disassembled on the desk beside her, sunlight spilling slowly across the metal components like honey, and that same light sent sparks from the vanity table mirror as Oksana finished braiding her hair and flicked the plait back over her shoulder. It was warm today, unseasonably so, and she could hear voices passing beneath her bedroom window as people moved back and forth in the street, tourists heading towards the sites or locals going out with their friends and their families. It was approaching dusk, but the crowds worried Oksana.

Innocents all.

She was putting books into a box, marked MEDIUM in English, and listening to her sister's footsteps in the kitchen as she waltzed with an invisible partner across the kitchen floorboards to an American indie song that crackled out of the old radio standing on the shelf above the stove.

Picking up another small book, Oksana flipped through a few pages and then dropped it into the box regardless. Settling her sunglasses over her eyes and setting her hat at an angle on her dark hair, she picked up the box and walked from one room to the next, narrowly avoiding a collision with Anzhelyna as she spun across the tiles.

" _Ostorozhno_!" Oksana snapped, and moved her sister out of the way with one hand.

"Going out?" Her grandmother didn't looked up from her position at the kitchen where she was slicing carrots at the speed of light.

"Yes," Oksana said, apologetic. "I'm on duty tonight."

"Do you want dinner before you..."

"I'll get something quick with the boys after, if you don't mind. I'll see you in the morning, babushka, and you, Anya." She bent at the waist and Anzhelyna slipped the strap of her satchel over her head.

"Come back in one piece," her grandmother said mildly.

Her footsteps were light on the steps as she jogged lightly down the steps of the apartment block and emerged into the wan late evening sun. Mikhail's car was parked haphazardly in the courtyard, the driver's door ajar and the trunk left wide open. She knocked the door shut with her hip as she passed and set the box of books into the boot, swapping it for one of the old Saiga-12s that lay half-concealed in an old blanket.

" _Privetek_ ," Mikhail said. He was standing by the gate to the apartment compound, watching the cars go by while he waited, and he crushed his cigarette with the heel of his shoe before walking over. "Ready to go?"

Next to the box of books, there was a cardboard box of magazines in the trunk of the car. Oksana pulled one out, checked the markings at the bottom, and slid it into place on her shotgun, rocking it and racking it. Ten rounds would be plenty. "Ready," she said.

Mikhail waited until they were in the car and approaching the intersection before he said, "Zvetlana called while I was waiting. You know that neighbour of hers?"

Oksana caught a glimpse of herself in the rear-view mirror, unreadable behind her shades. She smiled at herself, baring her teeth. A blaze of blue erupted behind her and she turned to watch as a police car raced past and disappeared into the city. "Yeah," she said.

"Tonight."

She looked at him. "Is it dangerous?"

He nodded. "It gets into your head," he said. "If you let it look at you. Meet its eyes."

Oksana flicked the lens of her sunglasses with a sharp nail and laughed. "Shouldn't be a problem."

She pulled on her jacket as she got out of the car, as they walked to meet the others. The elbows were patched - the back of it as well, with the logo of the militia on it in stark black and white. They weren't hiding who they were.

The others on duty that night - smiling Valentina, glowering Stefan, willowy Zvetlana - all held guns and nodded as Mikhail and Oksana joined them. The night was falling fast now, and the air held the promise of frost.

"They know," Stefan said bluntly as the group turned and began to walk across the square. At one end, the plaza tapered into an alleyway, lined on either side by fire escapes and back entrances to clubs and restaurants.

"They're going to try and run," Valentina added.

She was right. About a dozen feet into the alley, the back door of a restaurant was wrenched open and three figures stumbled out into the gloom. Two tall, a male and a female, and one small - a child. Oksana moved, swinging her shotgun up into position and flicking off the safety as the child screamed and the man put up his hands.

"Don't shoot!"

He stepped in front of the woman and the child, as though to shield them, and a chorus sang out of safeties being undone.

"Please," the man said. "She isn't hurting anyone. She's a good person. You don't have to be afraid..."

Had he known? Oksana wondered. Had he known, when he married it?

"Step aside," Stefan said, his voice commanding.

"Zvetlana?" The man looked at the woman with the gun. His neighbour. Maybe his friend. "You've babysat for Anatoly, you know me, you know her-"

"I know it's dangerous," Zvetlana said. The barrel of her gun, an old Stark rifle, dipped, and Oksana knew she was trying to find an aim that would spare man and boy.

" _I won't let you hurt her_. I won't let you hurt my son-"

"We don't kill children," Oksana said. That was true. They didn't.

"You're just a child yourself," the man said, looking at Oksana, sounding disgusted. "She's only a girl. You have a child murdering for you?"

Oksana tightened her grip on the barrel, swaying back and forth on her feet lightly as she adjusted her aim, dimly aware that she had stopped breathing in her total focus. Her aim settled on the metahuman's head. There. But the husband moved. Got in the way. She exhaled.

"Shut up," someone said behind her.

He was human. He was human.

"Does your mother know?" the man said quietly. "That you go out at night and murder?"

"Shut up," someone said behind her.

He lowered his hands. His hand went to his jacket. She saw the glint of a gun.

"Shut up," someone said behind her, and Oksana squeezed the trigger, just once, tight, and did not blink or close her eyes or jerk as the recoil crashed into her shoulder.

He dropped. The child screamed, and did not stop.

Oksana lowered her gun. Mikhail was holding her arm before she could blink or move her head - "it's okay" - and she shook her head - "it's not" - and stepped forward, as though to comfort the child before she caught herself and turned away just in time to see Zvetlana shoot the metahuman in the head. It fell.

The gunshots would bring police, if the screaming didn't bring Samaritans, but that wasn't what made them run. The militia had power, had faith, here. The police believed in them, in their cause. Nearly everyone did. They were the people's militia, and they had the support of their people, and they protected their people.

They ran because their blood was burning, because their nerves were alight beneath their skin, with shouts and laughter. Zvetlana and Stefan had disappeared around the corner, and nearly Mikhail with them, before he turned, caught sight of Oksana, who couldn't look away from the crying boy and the dead man, and came back to catch her by the sleeve. His voice was concerned - she wasn't sure if his eyes were. She couldn't tear her eyes away from the corpse on the ground.

" _Toropis, chto vas byespokoit_?"

"I killed him," she said.

Quietly.

"You've killed plenty of people before," he said.

Quietly.

"Not people," she said. "They weren't people."

Quietly.

"No," he agreed and the little boy bent his head down to his father's bloodied jacket and wept.

" _Poydem_ ," she said, and put the strap of her rifle over her shoulder and followed him out of the starlight.

* * *

"Agent Wallace."

Marsden liked the Tbilsi SHIELD base. She probably liked it best of any SHIELD base, which was damning by faint praise, but true. She liked how the air tasted, memory-filled and promise-crammed, set as it was in the heart of the old city. From the cobbled street, the long row of old shops and apartments seemed quaint, vaguely Parisian or Prague-esque, all facades and stonework and wrought-iron balconies, when in reality the partitions between each building had been removed to facilitate the organisation's base of eastern operations.

Even the innards of the base were picturesque - Sergeant Carter stood at the top of a flight of concrete stairs, one hand resting on the intricately-carved wooden banister, silhouetted by the light stained bloody by the coloured glass windows behind her. She wasn't alone - a tall man stood beside her, dressed in a leather jacket and jeans.

Marsden jogged the last few steps and extended a hand. "Sorry I'm late, Sergeant. Some idiot tried to commit vehicular manslaughter with a rickshaw on the Rust'avelis Gamziri."

She wasn't late, but she was the last to arrive, so it seemed only polite to have an excuse at the ready.

"You're fine," Carter said dismissively, and shook the younger woman's hand with a smile. "Nice to see you again, Marsden. It's been a while - Tripoli was the last time, wasn't it? Leonardo, this is Agent Wallace, clearance level four. Marsden, this is Doctor Aslan, also clearance level four. I wanted to speak to you two about a new assignment that requires boots on the ground."

Marsden offered her hand to Aslan as well - he had the grip of someone who knew he was a lot stronger than he wanted to look - before they followed Carter into one of the offices on the landing. She thought it might have once been a shop store-room - the walls were smooth concrete, the floor unfinished pine floorboards, and a scent like khachapuri and kishmishiani still lingered in the air, which felt here quite light, quite even. There were no windows - Marsden saw Aslan subtly tense when he realised the same.

"Agent Wallace is fluent in five languages and has a high degree of combat experience," Carter said by way of introduction. "Doctor Aslan is unparalleled in his field."

"What is your field?" Marsden asked."As a matter of interest."

He didn't smile. "Feline zoology."

Marsden arched an eyebrow. "Are you sending us to hunt lions, Sharon? Because the zoo promised me _personally_ they built a higher fence this time."

"Not quite lions," Carter replied. Pressing her fingers to the laptop in front of her, which balanced atop a precarious tower of box-folders, she projected an image up onto the wall in front of them. The light sent dust motes spinning in an invisible vortex, dancing and twirling.

It was an image, she saw, of a disaster site. It took her a moment to identify the Materanadan Museum of Yerevan - or what remained of its front entrance, anyway. The statue of a famous saint that had sat at the base of the steps had been reduced to only a plinth, surrounded by smoking rock fragments and what looked suspiciously of blood. A hole had been blown in the front of the museum, which had been swallowed up by smoke and dust. Mestop Mashtots' stone head lay, silent and unblinking, at the edge of the image.

Carter tapped a button.

A shaky video image of courtyard - it could have been in any colonised town in any colonised country, with red tiles and yellow walls and cobblestoned in between - and it was filled with fire. Fire without source, fire without fuel, just burning on the air itself, chasing itself into the sky, endless and unending. As Marsden watched, the fire seemed to fold back on itself and then blaze forward again, as though to consume itself. She could see figures moving in the centre, writhing.

Carter tapped a button.

Marsden could still remember chasing a woman across the entirety of the San Juanico bridge one misty, warm May morning. She had caught her, after two kilometres. It was the longest bridge in the Philippines, as distinctive as the sky, and it was gone. The photo showed the Leyte side of the strait and the other, Samar, side and no iron, no truss bridge, wound between. Nothing remained to indicate that anything had ever spanned that water. It was just... unmade.

"We caught her by surprise," Carter said quietly.

Beside her, Aslan put a hand through his prematurely silver hair and exhaled - his only reaction to the destruction in front of them. Marsden could feel her breath coming out shakily, her hands moving slightly. The air around her felt heavy, oppressively so.

"Jaguars, then," Marsden said, lightly. "Has to be. They're the only leonine mammals capable of handling... of handling a bazooka."

"When was this?" Aslan interrupted her. A part of her was glad - she hadn't been certain of where she was going with that. While he spoke, she studied his profile - the kind of man who could be handsome if he smiled, which he didn't seem to, with hair too white too young and fair skin that contrasted with glacier eyes.

Carter flicked through each in turn. "Three weeks. Three days. Three hours."

"What was this?" Marsden asked. She knew what she wanted to hear - some HYDRA scheme, human in nature and therefore flawed and fallible - and what she definitely didn't - aliens, gods, monsters and mayhem.

"We're not sure," Carter said, three words Marsden recognised as torture equal to any other for the older woman. "The higher ups are calling it an anomaly. But if that's what it is, then it's an anomaly in the shape of a girl."

Carter tapped a button.

An image appeared - so blurred Marsden could barely recognise it as a face, though the features were there, in broad strokes - an eye, a lip, the line of a cheekbone. In black and white, she could not even identify the girl's hair colour.

"Whoever she is, she's moving east," Marsden noted. "Yerevan, Samar... was that Macau?"

Carter nodded. "This is top priority. We don't even know what this girl's capabilities are - only that they are destructive and powerful. We're dropping everything to find her - all agents in the eastern divisions are being redeployed."

"Where's she going?" Aslan asked. "She's heading east..."

"We're not sure," Carter said again. "We don't even know where she is now, or where she'll be in an hour -"

Marsden frowned. "Teleportation?"

"She's persuasive," Carter said. "As far as we can tell, she mostly hitchhikes."

Marsden very nearly smiled, but Aslan's stony face prevented her. "Okay," she said.

"We're sending you to Kowloon," Carter continued. "Both of you. Hopefully as we gain a clearer image of her and her aims, we'll be able to narrow down our search, but for now, we have to consider that she has an entire world to hide in."

Behind her, the map of the world had stretched to encompass the entire wall and Marsden saw pinpricks of light flicker into being like tiny stars as each agent took their position. Codenames flashed briefly - _Tempest, Archus, Shadow_ \- as did names - _Blake, May, Haskins, Ward_ \- across the entire continent of Asia, some veering into the periphery of Eastern Europe and Russia, as far north and west as St. Petersburg.

But Marsden didn't watch the map. She was watching Aslan. Wondering.

A zoologist. Right.

Carter was holding out files to the two of them. Marsden accepted it, and tucked it under her arm. It was telling just how in the dark they were by how slender the file was. She doubted it held much more than what Carter had shown them.

"Sergeant," she said, slowly. Unhappy to have to ask. "This is an acquisitions mission. Correct?"

She knew. Marsden could see it in her eyes - Carter knew. But she was going to make Marsden Wallace ask anyway.

"Yes."

"Do you want her taken alive?"

Aslan had turned those glacial eyes on Marsden now. It seemed like they could scorch the very air between them. There was a frozen moment of silence.

"If she poses a danger to you, your fellow agents or civilians," Carter said. "I am authorising you to do what you believe is necessary. But unless we are talking mortal danger, I don't just want her alive, I want her unharmed. Are we clear?"

Marsden nodded and turned to leave. Aslan walked ahead of her.

"Wallace," Carter said.

Marsden turned.

"Are there any non-leonine mammals capable of handling a bazooka?" Carter asked. "As a matter of interest."

"No," Marsden replied. She shrugged. "Not that I know of at least. Now, if we're talking cetacea, I've heard rumours about the _balaenoptera borealis._.."


End file.
